SSRS and Fabric Paginated Reports: Be very careful with using "c" formatting for currency

While on site this week, another common problem that I see everywhere arose again.

When you need to format currency, you use the “c” format right? It’s in nearly every set of course materials I’ve ever seen. And people do it in almost every demonstration.

But so often, that’s wrong!

When you do this, you’re telling the system to display the monetary value using the local currency.

Is that correct though?

Even if you only ever work with one currency, take a long hard think about whether you really want the monetary values that you display automatically converting to the client system’s currency.

If you are reporting financial figures, for example, is it really appropriate that they should mysteriously suddenly change from dollars to yen because the client is based in Zama City rather than in New York City? Not likely. A million dollars in USD sales might be good but a million Yen in sales not quite so good :-)

And the same value certainly shouldn’t be automatically displayed differently in different locations.

Instead, we normally create a function that takes two parameters: the amount, and the currency that it should be displayed in. Then use that function to format the monetary amounts.

2026-03-21